Dr. Vikas Shah has published a post on his site Thought Economics, devoted to my imminently forthcoming book Moral Economics. The long transcript combines a conversation we had together, interspersed with bits of the book itself, paraphrased to appear as part of the live conversation.
"Roth’s new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work (Basic Venture, 2026), is a tour through what he calls repugnant transactions — exchanges that consenting parties want to make but that others believe should be forbidden, often on moral or religious grounds. The territory ranges from sex, surrogacy and adoption to alcohol, drugs, blood plasma, vaccine challenge trials, kidney transplants and medical aid in dying. Roth’s central argument is bracing in its calm: most contested markets cannot really be abolished, only relocated — driven underground, exported across borders, or left to operate informally and dangerously. The honest question is therefore not whether to permit such markets, but how to design and regulate them so that they command sufficient social support to work, and so that the costs and benefits fall in places we can defend. Markets, in his view, are tools to help decide who gets what; the work of moral economics is to keep asking, with evidence rather than absolutes, how those tools should be built. I spoke with him about the philosophical architecture of the book, the everyday paradoxes of repugnance, the lessons of kidney exchange, the controversies around vaccine challenge trials and assisted dying, and what new frontiers of moral contention the next generation of technologies — from CRISPR to artificial intelligence — will force us to confront."
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